RELATED ARTICLES

Share this article

Share

Mr Basescu said Romania did not have enough jobs for its workforce: 'Romania comes in behind states like Italy and Spain. In those countries , their social protection is at a level that makes Italians and Spanish, for example, feel comfortable to stay unemployed rather than working in hard manual tasks.

'Romanians do that hard labour for them to earn better and make more money than they could at home.'

Fiona McEvoy of the Taxpayers' Alliance said: 'President Basescu has held a mirror up to our welfare culture and identified the lack of incentives to work that mean so many UK nationals pick welfare over work, and so many migrants flock here to cash in'.

Mr Basescu's attack comes as Hungary gets set to hand passports to millions of people living
outside the EU - raising the prospect of a new wave of immigration into
Britain.

From next year, Hungary’s leaders will begin a huge
passport giveaway to minority groups who have historic or ethnic ties
to the East European country but live elsewhere.

Passport giveaway: Around 4.7 million people from countries like Moldova, Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine and Turkey will be eligible for Hungarian passports

Most of the
beneficiaries live in impoverished countries on the fringes of Europe.
Once they are given a passport, they will be entitled to full access to
the rest of the EU – including Britain.

Similar passport handout schemes - which are legal under EU laws - are under way in Romania and Bulgaria.

Together, it is estimated the three countries could add nearly five
million citizens to the continent’s population, at a time when it is
struggling to bounce back from a deeply damaging recession and
financial crisis.

Although they have come control for Romanian and Bulgarian
nationals, UK ministers are powerless to place restrictions on arrivals
from Hungary. That means the potential impact on Britain of two million
new Hungarian passports is much larger.

Hungary was one of eight Eastern European nations which joined the EU in 2004.

But Labour ministers, unlike their counterparts in Germany and
Austria, rejected the option of imposing work permit controls that
would have limited the numbers coming here.

That led to an estimated
one million arrivals from Eastern Europe – despite predictions the
number would be fewer than 20,000.

The restrictions on Romanian and Bulgarian nationals will expire in 2013 – opening the door to the UK.

Critics called for limits on the number of new passports member states could hand out to those living outside their borders.

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the MigrationWatch think-tank, said: ‘The sheer scale of this risks getting out of hand.

'When we granted equal access to EU citizens we had no idea that
member states would be dishing out passports to anybody they could
think of that had some previous link to their countries.

‘There has to be some limit to what member states are allowed to do in this respect.’

From January, Hungary intends to offer passports to millions of
ethnic Hungarians living outside its borders. That includes 300,000
living in Serbia and 160,000 in the Ukraine, neither of which is a EU member.

Share or comment on this article:

Romanian president Traian Basescu praises countrymen for claiming British benefits